Alfvén waves in dusty plasmas with plasma particles described by anisotropic kappa distributions

We utilize a kinetic description to study the dispersion relation of Alfv en waves propagating parallelly to the ambient magnetic field in a dusty plasma, taking into account the fluctuation of the charge of the dust particles, which is due to inelastic collisions with electrons and ions. We consider a plasma in which the velocity distribution functions of the plasma particles are modelled as anisotropic kappa distributions, study the dispersion relation for several combinations of the parameters jk and j?, and emphasize the effect of the anisotropy of the distributions on the mode coupling which occurs in a dusty plasma, between waves in the branch of circularly polarized waves and waves in the whistler branch. VC 2012 American Institute of Physics